The SQL language includes the SUM() aggregate function, that evaluates the sum of all the values in a given column, but it doesn't include a PROD() function that evaluates the product of those values. While this function is surely less commonly useful than SUM(), there are cases when you'd like ...

Many developers mistakenly believe that any error inside a transaction will make the transaction fail and automatically rollback. However, this is true only for fatal errors, such as most errors with severity equal to 16 or higher. The commonest runtime error - for example duplicate ...

You may retrieve a few important information about a connection to SQL Server by querying the server through appropriate @@ global variables. For example, the following routine takes an ADO Connection object that points to SQL Server and prints a few information about the connection:

At times you may need to swap the values of two columns of the same SQL Server table. For example, suppose that you realized that the fname column of the Employee table contains the last name of each employee, and vice versa. Typically you do this from VB using a writeable cursor-based ...

SQL Server's views are updateable, but it is possible that when you insert a new record or update an existing record, the record added or modified doesn't logical belog to the view any longer. For example, consider the following view:
CREATE VIEW authors_CA AS
(
...

Thanks to the SQL Server extensions for the Web and XML, it is now possible to query a SQL Server database (and get the result as XML) as well as insert, update, and delete records in a database. In this tip I'll show a few examples of this technique.
Here's a first example that shows how you ...

You can use XML to transfer both data and commands. In this column I'll show how you can update a database by means of XML commands sent over the HTTP protocol and, even more interesting, how to perform bulk uploads with these commands.
An updategram is a piece of XML data that contains ...